Sunday, 29 September 2013

Wakehurst Place, in
Sussex, is the most disappointing National Trust property I have ever visited.
Of course, people tend not to go there for the pleasure of wandering from room
to room of this once splendid Elizabethan mansion: Wakehurst is all about the
spectacular gardens and the National Seed Bank.
Indeed, you are hardly aware as you walk round and look respectfully up
at the tallest Christmas tree in England that the NT has anything to do with
the estate at all; it seems to be only the partnership with Kew Gardens that
counts here.

At least, though, the house is open – even if
it lacks furniture and atmosphere. There are a few rooms reserved for wedding
receptions and others apparently available for school groups on field trips. The
ground floor has the feel of a one-time prep school waiting to be put to new
use. There’s even a chapel, or there was: stripped now not only of its altar
but of every other furnishing, the only thing left is the important stained
glass. And even this is under threat.

I want to focus on the Crucifixion window,
which was commissioned from the Studio of Charles
Eamer Kempe in 1905. At first glance it is conventional enough: a ‘Stabat
Mater’ scene with St Mary and St. John, the beloved disciple, standing either
side of the Cross. The depiction of the dying Christ is conventional too: the
crown of grotesque thorns is powerfully drawn, but the loincloth lacks the
billowing defiance that is a distinctive feature of earlier Kempe Crucifixion
windows. Why, then, do I call this window important?

Well, for a start the figures of Mary and
John are finely drawn, St John particularly. Far from abject, he stares fixedly
at his dying friend, and his pose suggests a firmness of purpose: only the
whites of his knuckles as he grasps the hem of his cloak suggest the horror of
the event.

Then the background to the scene is
remarkable. Often such windows were designed with lozenge-shaped quarries to
fill the space behind the central image and the accompanying figures. (A good
example is the chancel window of Llandinabo Church,
1893, in Herefordshire, which has several features in common with the Wakehurst
window.) Here, though, Kempe has chosen to depict an open sky with naturalistic
clouds gathering on the horizon. Such expansive whiteness is rare in stained
glass of any period and would be arresting enough, but it is the vista in front
of the horizon that demands our close scrutiny.

In the foreground, the summit of Calvary is
depicted as a dark and fertile meadow: harebells, gentians

and daisies grow
among the grass and ferns. But the distant view beyond and below the Green Hill
is what draws the eye: across all three lights – the narrow tall central light
and the wider lower outer lights – Kempe’s chief draughtsman, John Lisle,
has produced an extraordinary fantasy roofscape: a medieval city of
cloud-capped towers, streaming pennants, bartizans, pantiles and buttressed
walls. Some of the spires are topped with crosses, yet on the road down from
Calvary towards the gateway into Jerusalem, Roman soldiers stand and chat at
the city’s gatehouse, where the portcullis is raised.

Anachronism, even historical and cultural
confusion on this heroic scale, has always been a feature of stained glass
representation of biblical events. What is so arresting here, however, is the
dramatic and exclusive use of silver staining
for the whole composition of the distant city: black and white, silver and
grey, ochre and umber, lemon and gold – these are the colours characteristically
created by silver staining. And indeed they dominate the entire window and unify
the whole design: the cross is silver stained, so are the great wedges hammered
into the ground at its base. So, too, the capacious cloaks worn by Mary and
John, and likewise the architectural framework of each light, where pairs of
rather mannered classical columns support round-headed arches topped by chubby cherubs,
from whose necks green foliate swags loop down to either side of the arches.

Extensive and exquisite use of silver
staining is an absolute hallmark of Kempe glass, both sacred and secular - see
for instance the panel originally made for Kempe’s own home, Old
Place, Lindfield (not far from Wakehurst) - but now at the National Trust’s
Wightwick Manor
near Wolverhampton . But I can point to no other window that employs silver
staining with such bizarre bravura as at Wakehurst.

To judge the strangeness of this window,
compare it with a window

in Rendcomb
Church, Gloucestershire. This, dating from a little earlier (1895), depicts
the Supper at Emmaus, on the evening of the Resurrection. Again the roofs and
towers of Jerusalem form a backdrop to the scene, but this time our viewpoint
is not looking up to the face of Christ and then to the top of the cross and
the bowed head of the dying Christ; now we are looking at him at eye-level
across the table. So we look down onto the rather crudely drawn cottage loaf,
from which Jesus has pulled the top-knot in the act of breaking bread. (We’ll
overlook the fact that the bread should have been unleavened.) In the distance,
blue-grey Jerusalem is silhouetted against the hills in the background: no
silver staining there. And the whole
scene is framed by a kind of pergola supporting a vine dripping with huge
pendulous bunches of grapes. One has only to contrast the range of colours in
the Rendcomb window with the austerity of the Wakehurst palette, to see how
striking this endangered window is.

It’s endangered because the architectural
consultants who are advising the National Trust on what to do about Wakehurst
Place want to take the Kempe windows out of the Chapel, so that the space can
be (dread word!) ‘re-purposed’. They don’t like the fact that below the stained
glass, the lower part of the three-light window has been blanked out with a
stone infill, which, from the outside, looks rather clumsy. This was hardly
Kempe’s fault: I assume that the infilling had been done originally to
accommodate a tall reredos behind the altar and that the window, when designed
by the Kempe Studio, was intended to come to the top of the reredos, and no
lower. The reredos has disappeared, of course, along with everything else that
once gave the Chapel meaning – except the stained glass. So to remove the glass
would be absolutely the wrong thing to do. It should stay.

Friday, 6 September 2013

A week ago I turned on the TV, anxious for
the latest news about Syria. Instead, I heard Seamus Heaney had died. In the
week since, I have thought hard about whether to write about his work. In my
teaching, reading and writing very few poets have
meant as much as Heaney has. Certainly no living poet comes close. But now
what, as a friend asked a couple of days ago, is there to add? Much that has
appeared in print so far has been heartfelt, mourning the loss of a great poet
and a benign and humble man who lived a private life in public. Some of it,
though, has been too self-regarding: ‘me and my friend Seamus’ has become a
tedious trope.

I have noted a tendency for people to adopt
a Heaneyesque turn of phrase. Matthew Hollis, for instance, poet and poetry
editor at Faber, described him in the Guardian
as ‘a man of hearthside … showing countless readers what was possible in
language, encouraging us to dig a little deeper, to break the skin of our
consciousness and our articulacy.’ Had Hollis just been re-reading ‘The Tollund
Man in Springtime’?

... a
spade-plate slid and soughed and plied

At
my buried ear, and the levered sod

Got
lifted up; then once I felt the air

I was like
turned turf in the breath of God ….

Heaney himself sometimes wrote for the Guardian. In 2007, he described
his own first close encounter with a photograph of the head of the Tollund Man:

No
representation of the human face, before or since, not Veronica’s napkin or
Rembrandt’s self-portraits, has had such a profound effect on me. No better
example exists of how flesh and blood life can be transformed into the
otherness of an image with the power, in Yeats’s words, “to engross the present
and dominate memory.” (Guardian Review, 24.11.07, p.6).

I remember discussing with the students I
was then teaching how Yeats’s explanation of the power of an image ‘to engross
the present and dominate memory’ gave an accurate and precise account of
Heaney’s own poetry. A powerful demonstration too – ‘to engross’ suggests not
only ‘to captivate’ but also ‘to add together, to give greater weight’. Such
concentration of meaning in a single word (which itself seems to expand as you
say it) is evident everywhere you look in Heaney’s writing.

Actually, the whole paragraph encapsulates
Heaney the individual as well as the scholar and poet. It begins rhetorically, withholding the object of the first sentence (the poet himself) until
the very end. Three negatives – No … not … [n]or – introduce an explosively
positive affirmation. There is a glancing nod towards his Catholic childhood (Veronica’s napkin) while his reference to
Rembrandt’s self-portraits reminds us of Heaney’s own unflinching self-scrutiny.
It reminds us too that he admires this in other poets. Writing in the Irish Times in 1978 about Robert
Lowell’s last volume of poems, Day by Day,
and just after Lowell’s death, Heaney concluded:

His death makes
us read this book with a new tenderness towards the fulfilments and sufferings
of the life that lies behind it, and with renewed gratitude for the art that he
could not and would not separate from that life. It is not as braced and
profiled as, say, Life Studies;
rather the profile has turned to us, full face, close, kindly, anxious, testing
– a husband’s face, a father’s, a child’s, a patient’s, above all a poet’s.

Surely one could, with absolute accuracy,
say precisely the same about Heaney and his own final volume, Human Chain?

There’s
more to mention about Heaney’s encounter with the image of the Tollund man. That
anaphoric opening of the second sentence –
‘No better example’ – introduces an assertion of the two-way commerce
between life and the image of life: flesh and blood into art and vice versa. The dead head is nevertheless
alive as an image that moves and troubles us now. But Heaney
isn’t claiming this insight for himself. More and more in the latter part of
his career, he shared with his readers the words of other poets, making us
aware through translation and quotation of what others had already spoken that he wanted us to hear for ourselves. And in quoting here from
Yeats, one Irishman coming after another, he reminds us of his own debts and
inheritances.

While I was still watching the news last
Friday evening, an email arrived from a good friend. It was the first of
several messages from pupils, students and colleagues, each
one wanting to tell me how much reading and reflecting on Heaney’s poetry has
meant to them. This first message read:

It's
pleasing, at least, that [Heaney’s death] is making headlines …. I hope the focus remains on his extraordinary contribution as an
original poet, and a champion of old poetic texts, not on the minor excursions
into Irish politics.

Our times together reading, discussing
and studying his poetry remain amongst my strongest and fondest memories of our
adventures in literature.

Heaney’s
poems, allusive and rich in their references to other times and other writers,
are themselves adventures in literature. I’m unsure, though, about the ‘minor excursions into Irish politics’. For Heaney, the impact in 1969 of ‘the original heraldic murderous encounter between
Protestant yeoman and Catholic rebel’ was a watershed:

From that moment the problems of poetry
moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to
being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament …. I felt it
imperative to discover a field of force in which, without abandoning fidelity
to the processes and experience of poetry as I have outlined them, it would be
possible to encompass the perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time
to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity
and complexity. ('Feeling into Verse')

This balancing act became a burden. In ‘Weighing In’, a poem written at a time when the Irish Troubles
seemed more intractable than ever, he confessed:

Two sides to
every question, yes, yes, yes …

But every now
and then, just weighing in

Is what it must
come down to ….

He condemned himself for having once ‘held
back when I should have drawn blood’, concluding that his hesitation betrayed

A deep mistaken
chivalry, old friend.

At this stage
only foul play cleans the slate.

But here Heaney was, for once, wrong. His
chivalry was not mistaken. As the playwright Frank McGuinness has said, ‘During
the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict he was our conscience: a
conscience that was accurate and precise in what it articulated’.

As with his conscience, so with his poetry. Heaney was, to use a phrase from the Anglo-Saxon poem 'Deor', a leoðcræftig monn,which phrase he himself rendered as ‘master of
verse-craft’. Indeed, now he has, like Yeats in Auden’s memorable words,
‘become his admirers’, it seems to me his own words are his best memorial:

Full face,
foursquare, eyelevel, carved in stone.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: a page from Guardian, 31.8.13, plus copies of
Heaney’s first and last collections of poetry.

[references:
quotations from Matthew Hollis and Frank McGuinness are taken from the Guardian, cited above .‘The Tollund Man
in Springtime’ is in Heaney’s collection District
and Circle (2006); ‘Weighing In’ is in The
Spirit Level (1996) and the line ‘Full face, foursquare …’ opens the
poem ‘The Pattern’ in Human Chain
(2010). The essays ‘Full Face’ (about Robert Lowell) and ‘Feeling into Words’
are to be found inHeaney’s Preoccupations, Faber, 1984 edition.

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk